I have been a committed technophile since the first time I watched Tomorrow's World back in the Seventies. They presented a future world of white shiny walls and electronic control. The new millennium looked like an exciting place to be.

I write this having just tried to get my remote control to set the video machine to record a favourite show in a room with magnolia walls. I am a little disappointed and feel like asking Raymond Baxter for an explanation.

I vaguely recollect the show displaying the first mobile phone; and what a monster it was. It was only mobile in the very loosest sense of the word in that you had to have been training in the gym for several months before attempting to carry it.

In those days, of course, you had to get a mortgage in order to buy one and by the time they were cheap enough for me to enter the market both the price and the size had shrunk.

It was a similar situation with video cameras; when they first launched as a consumer item I was working for Radio Rentals and had the opportunity of seeing one at first hand.

There were three main parts to this technological marvel; firstly there was the camera section complete with lens. Then there was the recorder unit taking full-size VHS cassettes. Finally came the battery pack that, as far as my memory and my frozen shoulder is concerned, was taken directly from a Morris Minor.

My first job with this high street rental company was to visit a series of older customers to repair some very old-fashioned Bakelite radios. What a clash of technologies there seemed to be between the ultra-modern camcorder and the am wireless.

A few years after this, Radio Rentals stopped doing what their name suggests and I was offered a warehouse full of old valve sets that were destined for the scrapheap. I was in my early 20s and apart from the fact that it all looked like a pile of junk, I had no vision of a world where you could sell practically anything on eBay.

I wonder how many other things I have refused to take advantage of because they seemed worthless.

I remember watching the Antiques Roadshow to which a lady had brought a rather dull and battered painting of cat. After the expert had spoken at length about this most plain of objet d'art, he asked what price at been paid for it and where it had been purchased.

The lady had spied it in a car boot sale some six months earlier and bought it for 50p - which to my mind was all that it was worth. Her delight was immense when she was now told on national television that she owned a painting worth around £14,000.

I had to chuckle at the thought of some car boot sale devotee watching as they realised that they had let go of something far more valuable than they had realised.

In a smaller way, it has probably happened to all of us at some point; just think of that old coffee table that grandma had, then thought worthless and now selling for a few hundred pounds. The old Matchbox cars that I had as a kid that fetch several pounds each on the internet.

In light of this, I am building up a collection of things that might one day be rare and valuable.

It includes a supermarket carrier bag to show how we messed up the environment, a mobile phone without bluetooth to show how we had to hold it next to our ear to use it, an audio cassette player to show how bad music could sound in your car, and a street map to show how we found our way around without sat nav.

Will these things one day be rare? Possibly. Will they be valuable? I think not.